If one looks back at the last 15 years, one can only get surprised at the change that has happened in the Indian society in terms of its advances in its living standard and self esteem. If you look around almost every one has a mobile phone and the pay packets of many has gone up which has resulted in increased spending. Though this is still a urban phenomenon , the torch bearer of the change - the IT has touched up the lives of many of even those who lives in villages.
IT and its influence is everywhere.. As in BPOs and Call centers, creating more more service based industries which never existed in the past. IT has gone into schools, hotels and hospitals, railway stations, billing and what not..Without it we cant live a single day..
Not just services , IT in a more technical sense called software..has gone into the heat of almost all products that we use..Be it mobiles or the washing machine or the ticketing machine ur bus conductor uses or the billing machine in the shop.
The technology came from West and hence it was costly ..Even the west found it costly to implement, Then can the Taiwanese and Chinese who made silicon wafers with no ends. But again to impart life into this carbon family products Westerners charged for the lines of code they wrote which became the DNA for these otherwise lifeless materials.
Then came the Indian who knew little bit of English and he soon realized coding is simple to learn than the human language itself..It is a matter of patterns and repetitions. So he took over the job from the white man..And delivered the product at a much lesser cost. Result software and IT is everywhere in the world..
But,What next..?
The prices of silicon has come to less than that of the coal..So is the price for the lines of code .Just as there is so much of silica on the sea side which can be converted into a complex IC with near zero cost, we have too many who can always do the basic coding with the help of a bit training ..And for that we have too many training centers.
With the biggest consumer in the world - the US is at the verge of a cross road - a probable recession that could be unlike the previous ones they faced , could make a U turn in the economic giant's course in time..And with that the Dollar could be increasingly cheaper. we have already seen the beginning of the end.
It is a double edged sword. One one side we have lesser customers for the software products the emerging India would produce with numerous IT professionals in waiting after paying huge sums for the Engg seats ,; On the other side we have less billing for every quantum of service we will be producing in future.
I wasjust thinking about the future that is not far off.. With the hype over IT there is a big segment of the common public ready to spent whatever they have to get their children come out of the engg colleges as IT engineers.. They are mesmerized by the success of the few in the past who just happened to be in history at the right time when the demand was there and supply what quite matching up. But the equation is changing fast.It will become more and more difficult for every one to be a software engineer and hope to get a starting 25K salary.
With the number of seats in Engg colleges going up for IT vis a vis other disciplines, and with the ever decreasing cut of limits for qualification for the same, one wonders we are facing a potentially large number of unemployable youth with only skillet as IT and nothing else ,at the end of a 5 years time frame
There was a time engineering was study of the engines and of machines and of things in real life. Under the weight of a myth of a a "super technology" called IT, just wondering, if the country's planners have failed to get the right skills built into the society for a long term growth.
The greatest strength of humans lies in their hands with amazing degrees of freedom. He built the world around him with his brain and his hands, it was later called as engineering.That goes into the sector called manufacturing. And what is its percentage in our GDP..?
Did someone say India is developing..? Really? Are we seeing our hands at work.. ? Are we more comfortable holding the "mouse" in imaginary world called IT, which is having a shell as thin as that of a bubble which can burst anytime?
